A few hours ago I finally saw the restored It, the frothy 1927 romcom that catapulted Clara Bow into superstardom. It screened at 3 pm at the Bedford Playhouse.
Over the decades I’ve watched…oh, a couple of dozen classic silent films via broadcast TV, streaming and DVD/Bluray, but before today I’d never actually sat down and seen a professionally restored, scratch-free, silvery-sheen silent on a large screen inside a first-rate theatre.
Bow is spunky, luscious and luminous, of course, but her male costars, the 40 year-old Antonio Moreno (the romantic lead) and the 43 year-old, British-born William Austin, pale alongside her — they don’t have her energy or any sort of male equivalent of “flesh impact.”
26 year-old Gary Cooper, whom Bow was romantically involved with during filming, has a dialogue-free cameo as a newspaper reporter, but he should have been cast as Bow’s principal object of desire (i.e., Moreno’s role)
The social customs, attitudes and presumptions depicted in It feel a bit creaky here and there, and it’s certainly stocked with what can only be called rube-level humor. But I enjoyed the spirited, screw-it-all attitude.
I couldn’t help noticing that the petite, cute-as-a-button Bow had hands and feet that weren’t exactly Japanese geisha-sized. No offense but her feet especially seemed a bit beefy.
Released in January of ’27, It was a silent film, of course. The Jazz Singer didn’t open until October of that year, but once sound came along the appeal of silent films plummeted fast.
Blue-chip restoration guru Robert Harris oversaw the It refreshment, and this spiffed-up, 99-year-old classic (“the first Hollywood romcom”) will continue to be screened on the festival circuit.
Unbridled spirit was the essence of Bow’s appeal. Her improvisational flapper energy comes right off the screen. She was a live wire extraordinaire.
“There seems to be no pattern, no purpose to her life. She swings from one emotion to another, but she gains nothing, stores up nothing for the future. She lives entirely in the present, not even for today but in the moment. Clara is the total nonconformist. What she wants she gets, if she can. What she desires to do, she does.
“She has a big heart, a remarkable brain, and the most utter contempt for the world in general. Time doesn’t exist for her, except that she thinks it will stop tomorrow. She has real courage, because she lives boldly. Who are we, after all, to say she is wrong?” — Adela Rogers St. John on Clara Bow.
From “Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Clara Bow, ‘It’ Girl.” by Hairpin‘s Anne Helen Petersen:
“Clara Bow doesn’t look like a relic. She doesn’t look like she belongs in the ’20s, or even in black and white. She looks nothing like the other stars of the silent era, who either seemed frozen in puberty (Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish), outrageously “exotic” (Theda Bara, Pola Negri), or untouchably glamorous (Gloria Swanson). This girl’s got something like whoa.
“Look at her. She looks so…MODERN. Like she could be a star today, right? When I show footage of Bow to my undergraduates, who generally consider the viewing of silent film as the sixth level of hell (trumped only by the viewing of Soviet silent film) they can’t take their eyes off her. It’s her movement, her eyes, the way she flirts with the camera.
“But it’s something else, too – something Billy Wilder once referred to as ‘flesh impact,’ a rare quality shared only with the likes of Jean Harlow, Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe. Flesh impact meant having ‘flesh which photographs like flesh,’ flesh you felt you could reach out and touch — or flesh with which you would very much like to have sex.
“That desire made Clara Bow a star, but would also make it easy to tell outrageous stories about her, and for people to believe those outrageous stories. In 1927, she was the No. 1 star in America. When she retired in 1931 amid a tangle of scandals, she was all of 28 years old.”
